A Walk Through San Lorenzo di Roma

Aux portes de Rome

Un quartier singulier. La seule zone de Rome bombardée, lors de la deuxième guerre.

Quatre mille bombes ; trois mille victimes, dont le souvenir flotte toujours autour de ces rues.

Ces quelques rues, un kilomètre carré tout au plus, où se regroupe la Rome révolutionnaire.

Malgré tout, ce qui choque le visiteur, ce sont ces milliers de mètres de graffitis.

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What is Venice’s Future?

Abbiamo un futuro ? Venice (2010)

Venice is an extraordinary city — as long as you love old architecture and incredible landscapes of ancient houses and canals going out to sea. But it is also overcrowded by tourists. Is it still possible to actually live in such a city? Does Venice still belong to the Venetians?

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Frutti, merci e pesci! Markets in Catania

DCORBEIL | Rose sur Azur

DCORBEIL | Bloody morning

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Indiana Jones Arrives in Catania: Palazzina

DCORBEIL | Una candela nella notte, 2008

Matin de soleil discret et de fraicheur prenante. J’ouvre le double battant de cette vieille fenêtre. J’y prend, le temps d’un instant suspendu, une large bouffée d’air. Au loin, des bruits sourds. Cris stridents. Voitures agressives. Cinq heures le matin : la ville se réveille déjà. Aurore violet. Je regarde la rosée qui suinte le long des vieilles pierres de ce palazzo.

Enivrement baroque.

Après une arrivée tardive, j’avais installé temporairement ma vie dans un gîte trouvé à la hâte sur internet. B&B Da Lucia. Un espace central, à partir duquel je pourrais poursuivre ma découverte de Catania.

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Indiana Jones Arrives in Catania: Taxi Driver

DCORBEIL | L’Etna fume la pipe : 2006

« Je suis à peine débarqué de cet avion trop petit que je pose mes pieds sur la piste. Le bus m’attend sous une pluie froide battue violemment par un vent gonflé d’une chaude humidité. On embarque, on débarque. Dix mètre à peine, tour de bus inutile et paresseux.

Les douaniers me parlent avec mollesse et estampillent mon passeport canadien sans me jeter le moindre regard. Je ne comprend rien de leur anglais, et ils n’essaient même pas de me parler en italien. Traitement éclair, acceptations hâtives. On me force à dégager le maigre espace dédié aux étrangers et je m’engouffre dans les couloirs du terminal, les secousses du vol encore au ventre.

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Drinking from the Big Nose

Drinking fountains are everywhere in Rome, quite useful in a city where temperatures hover above 35C in the summer. These cast-iron fountains are known affectionately as nasoni, or “big noses,” due to the Pinocchio-esque appearance of their spouts. The design dates back to 1872, when the first twenty fountains were installed. Today, there are over 2,000 in the city, most of them emblazoned with the ancient Roman motto SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus).

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The Fine Art of Signage

Genoa

One of the big joys of travelling in Italy—besides the food, the ice cream and the coffee—is the beautiful signs you see everywhere. Italians know the fine art of signage, and they know the art of preserving old but highly functional signs.

Rapallo

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Waiting for the Bus: Rome

Window Shopping

Venice

Genoa

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Balcony Life in Rome

In the sweltering Roman summer, balconies aren’t used so much to escape the heat—that’s what air conditioning and metal shutters are for—as they are to linger over a cigarette, spying on the neighbours. Or maybe just to hang the laundry.

Passing Under the Tracks

Railroad viaducts make for a distinct kind of underpass: not too long but exceptionally dank and dreary, made ominous by the rattle of trains passing overhead. In downtown Montreal, pedestrians passing under the Windsor Station CPR tracks are subjected to all manners of mysterious liquids and pigeon poop. The tracks that feed Rome’s Trastevere Station are no different when they pass over the busy via Portuense, except for one thing: the Roman penchant for tagging, and the apparent efforts to cover up the tags with murals and paint, have created a strange patchwork of colours and designs.

Class Trip to the Spanish Steps

As a hazy dusk descended over Rome, we caught the tram into the old city and wandered past all of the historic sights whose names had filtered into our imaginations through generations of pop culture: the Tiber River, the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain. All of them, predictably, were packed by tourists, each one trying desparate to take photos that would make it seem like they alone had encountered these landmarks in their most pristine, unmolested state.

But the throngs of visitors (not to mention the vendors lurking around to sell them stuff, and the few locals passing by who pretended to ignore the whole scene) provided ample amusement for me. Also, apparently, for this young Polish girl, who spoke enough English to tell us that she was on a class field trip and that she was enjoying it very much.

Into the Heart of Trastevere

Almost every city has a part of town, on the other side of a river or train tracks, that is quite literally eccentric: idiosyncratic, out of the way and determinedly unique. In Rome, this area is Trastevere, which means “Across the Tiber.” Although its oldest section, just across the river from the city’s historic centre, is a popular destination for tourists and local scenesters, the newer, more outlying parts of this large and ambiguous district have an easy workaday feel, where the barely-contained chaos of Roman life somehow becomes more manageable.

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One Day in Rome

Waiting for the tram outside Trastevere Station